


The Spy who Lost His Way

by apiphile



Series: the spy who... [3]
Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Genre: Bargaining, Blowjobs, Car Sex, Cars, Choking, Driving, Feud, LAWL THE 70S, London, M/M, Sequel, Series, anger as a cover for attraction, bring on the stupid comments, details that are irrelevant if you don't know london, disturbing sex, dub-con, excessive description of heat because it's bastard cold here, mirrors and mirroring, misindentification of cars for continuity reasons, no shut up there's a plot in here somewhere, pastoral bullshit, peter guillam: unacknowledged sadist, ricki tarr you bring these things on yourself, sexually attracted to the words "suck you off", technically this counts as prostitution, thought i might as well spell everything out in the tags, tiny bit of institutionalised racism from the PoV character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-07
Updated: 2012-02-07
Packaged: 2017-10-30 18:22:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/334717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to "The Spy Who Got What He Deserved, If Not What He Wanted" and "The Spy Who Gave As Good As He Got (Or Worse)", Ricki Tarr's ongoing feud with Verhoeven looks like it might finally reach some resolution at the cost of Peter Guillam's sanity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Spy who Lost His Way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jar/gifts).



The first time Peter Guillam received a blowjob from Ricki Tarr he had been intending to call him an arsehole and throw him out of his Porsche.

In the back of his mind, he was sure (and Guillam suspected that knowing this had helped overturn his resolution), he wasn't as furious with one unruly, uncontrollable scalp-hunter as he was with himself.

It was the middle of summer; the Porsche smelled suspiciously of dead mouse, as if something had crawled under the bonnet for refuge from the heat and had instead cooked to death against the engine. Guillam hadn't had time to look at it, and didn't fancy relinquishing the car to a mechanic only to be told that he had a rodent fused to a piston.

Sitting in a traffic Jam somewhere around Oxford Circus which hadn't moved for a good ten minutes - someone was having a "proper set-to" with a bus driver, the taxi driver in front of him informed him conversationally, when he hung his head out of the Porsche's window - Guillam was already hot, irritable, and thirsty when the door to the passenger side opened and Tarr climbed in as if he'd been waiting for a lift.

He was at least dressed for the weather; low-waisted blue jeans that were too young even for him, a grey t-shirt and a new haircut out of keeping with the vagrancies of his vanity and fashion-consciousness; a simple short back and sides, a little too long on top. It would have looked like Guillam's own if he'd had curls; instead it was too fluffy, and his neck was damp with sweat. 

The seats were hot enough to make Guillam uncomfortable through his suit (he'd thrown the jacket on the back seat but his shirt stuck to him, and he'd rolled the sleeves up to the elbow); they must have burned Tarr for he flinched his elbow away from the leather and gave the air in front of him an annoyed look.

"Go one further," Guillam suggested, instead of greeting him. "Put a red flag on the roof and find a bullhorn and shout 'CIRCUS EMPLOYEES COMING THROUGH', that should finish us off nicely."

"No one's watching," Tarr said, "there's a proper fight going down there, right? Fists and feet." He was interrupted by a flurry of angry horns and the confirmation of a police siren cutting through the midday noise.

"Get out of my car," Guillam sighed. Tarr was right, no one was watching and at most they would think Tarr was a friend taking the opportunity to catch a lift, which was almost accurate in every detail except the usual assumption that friends liked one another. He supposed that, in the worst case, an onlooking might presume they were lovers, which was somehow a lot, lot worse than it ought to be.

"Just come from Brixton?" Tarr asked. Guillam glanced at him in the mirror. There were hollows under his eyes, but he didn't appear to be bruised, bleeding, or suffering from a fever, which made him even less Guillam's problem than usual.

"You already know," Guillam said. He could feel the metal of the window frame turning a thin line along the underside of his forearm red in the heat. He could feel the sweat on the back of his neck trickling down inside the collar of his shirt. He could feel the oven-like air inside the car usurping the Brylcreem in his hair and turning it slowly into a knot of blond curls. All of this was background noise to how keenly he could feel the presence of an overheated, anxious man in the passenger seat even when he looked away.

Tarr shrugged; the movement made his seat jerk back. "No one tells me anything," he said with the exaggerated air of wounded innocence he liked to employ so often.

_Bollocks_ , thought Guillam savagely. Ten minutes, two minutes of flirtation with one of the girls would easily secure Tarr at least a general whereabouts of anyone he might be looking for; usually it was possible to chase out what time a fellow had left and when he would be expected back by, too.

The sirens reached a crescendo and stopped; through the muggy air Guillam heard the specific intonation of a metropolitan constable reprimanding someone to calm down, and the unmistakable sound of someone - accent West Indian - refusing to calm down. Something about someone not paying for a ticket.

“So where’re we going?” Tarr asked, stretching out in the passenger seat as if he belonged there.

“ _We_ aren’t going anywhere,” Guillam said, rising to it. It was the heat. The unbearable, mouth-drying heat that had stirred up the fight ahead of them too, no doubt: _The day is hot, the Capulets abroad, and, if we meet, we shall not scape a brawl; For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring._

“Yeah, the traffic’s bloody awful, right,” Tarr said, with a meaningful glance at the open windows and the cabbie in front of them. The arse of it was that he was right about that; if Guillam gave into the urge to bodily expel him from his car and they found themselves in a scuffle it would draw the attention of the conveniently already-present police. The last thing the Circus needed was the Met putting their thin blue line through their affairs.

Tarr began tapping his knuckles, each in turn, against the window frame. The muscles of his arm squirmed minutely with each tap; Guillam turned away irritably and watched pedestrians crowding up the centre of the road, peering on their tip-toes at the ensuing ruck.

“Seen Verhoeven lately?” Tarr asked, stopping in mid-tap. It didn’t quite sound casual – even had Guillam not been keenly aware of why it was not a casual question, the strained anxiety in Tarr’s voice was not wholly covered over with the tarpaulin of indifference. A breeze, otherwise welcome, came hot and wet as a breath through the open windows as it made its way up Regents Street faster than any of the cars on it were.

“No,” said Guillam, who had interviewed him three days ago. It had been a frustrating experience not improved by his lack of sleep, the ever-gyrating requirements of Martingdale and Lacon and the rest, and his profound sense that whatever he was doing to keep Brixton house behaving itself was merely arranging deckchairs on the Titanic. 

Verhoeven had been typically unforthcoming as to the cause of the fight, drinking coffee with a face like a sour sweet behind the unusually empty desk in Guillam’s typically uninhabited office. He was quick to point out just how much of a contribution Tarr had made to the imbroglio once Guillam’d started on his pompous-sounding-even-to-him speech about this being a difficult time for the Circus and how it was important to keep a low profile and remain off everyone’s radar and a double fistful of every military-sounding cliché he could lay his mind on; but in spite of this there was no indication as to what had brought it about, why Verhoeven was still pursuing it, _whether_ Verhoeven was still pursuing it, or even of the kind of red-blooded-male insults for _fairy boys_ that might suggest that Tarr had let slip about his activities.

At least the tiled room he’d interviewed Verhoeven in – previously a shower room, it seemed – was blessedly cool, unlike this deathtrap his beloved Porsche had become. 

“Oh,” Tarr said, resuming his fucking irritating compulsive tapping.

“Where’ve you been?” Guillam asked, after a moment, if only to make the tapping stop.

“Don’t you know?” Tarr asked with an absolute abuse of a smile. Because Tarr was clearly thinking about it – as a gaggle of girls in a very ugly shade of brown passed the car and one peered in the window at them – he wondered quite what would happen if Verhoeven chanced upon them here, and nearly shrank down into his seat at the enormity of the _paperwork_.

“I’ve been busy,” Guillam said, watching Tarr watch the girls pass the car. “More important things to do than keep an eye on you.”

That, and Tarr had proven surprisingly adept at covering his tracks; Guillam could hardly justify calling out pavement artists to keep after him, even if they were sitting around doing nothing. He’d have to come up with some reason why Tarr merited close examination, and there was the risk that he’d recognise whoever Guillam put on him anyway. So he’d limited himself to a few measures, lost Tarr quite soon after the nuisance had cleared out of his flat, and comforted himself with the thought that if Verhoeven did succeed in killing him there would be one less thing to worry about.

The traffic began moving again so abruptly that Guillam was taken by surprise to find the the taxi in front of them pulling away into the gaps forming in the jam; the car behind him set up a moody honk of the horn and he struggled, nearly stalling the engine.

"Careful there," Tarr said, resting his face on his hand and his elbow against the window frame, with the closest to a real smile he'd managed since inserting himself unwanted into the car. "Don't want to draw attention to yourself."

The look Guillam threw at him verged on the murderous.

Oxford Circus slipped past as if it was nothing but a blip in a continual stretch of road, and they continued upon Regent Street without pause; All Souls and Broadcasting House passed by without a word from Tarr, and Guillam finally managed to change out of first gear as the Porsche pulled onto Langham Place.

"Where're we going?" Tarr repeated, apparently convinced that he was accompanying Guillam wherever the Porsche was headed.

"I'm going to Cheltenham, you're getting out as soon as I can pull over."

Tarr ignored this. "You're going to Cheltenham _this_ way? From _Brixton_?"

"Roadworks," Guillam said as succinctly as he could. The little breeze coming in as they drove cooled him down just enough to prevent him from losing his temper, but it stank of exhaust fumes and other people's sweat and he was sure he wouldn't be able to get it out of his shirt.

"Roadworks," Tarr repeated incredulously, and went back to tapping the windscreen with his index knuckle ... middle knuckle ... ring knuckle ... and permanently bent pinkie. 

Guillam had in fact spent the morning stuck in one of the interchangeable offices in Whitehall, fantasising with increasing intensity about quitting public service and becoming a chicken farmer, while a limp desk fan failed to mitigate the heat that subdued the bureaucratic bickering to a low whinge. He found, however, that there was absolutely no reason for Tarr to know this.

"I was in the Lake District," Tarr said, somewhat improbably and without prompting. Guillam tried to picture Tarr in the Lake District and found he could only manage it if he mentally included the presence of some emotionally frail women with failing marriages on a walking holiday, when it became all too plausible. 

Guillam drove into another wall of traffic as Portland Place became Regents Park and more importantly Marylebone Road. "Fuck's sake," he said to the steering wheel, and a fat bumble bee - doubtless on its way from one happy feeding ground in the park to another - tumbled without concern through his window. 

"Not going to ask why ... sir?" Tarr asked.

Guillam stared at him for a while, his whole body hunched over the wheel in the hopes of drying the sweat on the back of his shirt. "Unless I'm going to need this information at an inquest I don't want to hear about it."

The car in front stalled and a cloud of black-brown smoke billowed forth from the exhaust. Guillam swore again, but after some phlegmatic grumbles the car's engine turned over again and the Rover inched forwards with the rest of the hot, frustrated traffic.

While the bee circled between them in sleepy confusion, Guillam sighed heavily into the rim of the steering wheel and reached down to hold shirt cotton away from his belly. It was stuck with sweat, and the operation was not as graceful or as simple as he'd have liked.

The park must be an Elysian marvel at this very moment, but here he was stuck in his car, driving to _Cheltenham_ to remonstrate with outpost listeners and somehow suddenly stuck with a very extraneous Tarr in the passenger seat.

"Has it healed?" he asked, finally.

Tarr said, "No thanks to you."

Guillam looked away, and eased down on the accelerator in time to keep them bumper-to-bumper with the Rover in front (periodically bathed in and choking on the fumes); once they got to Park Road, at this time of day, it should be plain sailing through Finchley and he could chuck Tarr anywhere past St John's Wood.

Tarr said, "You can check, if you like."

"No," Guillam said hastily, even as his neck muscles tried to turn traitor on him and draw his head back to look. "Do us both a kindness and get out here."

"That's not doing me any kindness," Tarr said, slumping back against the hot leather seat as the Porsche surged forwards. "Verhoeven's back on at least one of his feet again, I don't want to be in London."

"Get a train," Guillam suggested.

A few thoughts collided with each other; Tarr had known where to find him, and known he was heading out of the city. He'd evidently sweet-talked someone at the main building after all, and was probably well-aware that Guillam had been in interview with Verhoeven. Maybe that was even why he'd come back from the Lake District - if that was where he'd really been - to see if Verhoeven was still out for blood. A risky gamble and, judging by his haste to get back out of the city, not one that paid off.

The traffic inched forwards again, creeping past the park and down towards the turning that would put him in the relative clear.

The bee spiralled dizzily between them.

"What _exactly_ the hell," Guillam asked, "where you doing in the Lake District?"

Tarr treated him to his most lascivious of faked smiles, one which overshot attractiveness by a long yard and landed squarely in the map reference determined "caricature". He held Guillam's gaze until Guillam wanted to smash his head against the dashboard and hang the consequences for the woodwork.

"Cottaging with ministers," Tarr said, putting on a miserably inaccurate estuary accent. He was a bit old to be playing at a bit of rough, Guillam thought dispassionately. "Thought they might be able to give me a hand, didn't I?"

Guillam ignored the jibe. "I assume since you're here that didn't succeed."

Tarr shrugged. His t-shirt was too small and his trousers were too low. He looked the picture of a rent boy and Guillam wondered if he'd come straight from his exploits in the Lake District to Guillam's car without actually stopping to change his clothes. "There's always the fall-back."

Burning them, of course. Anyone he _fucked_ was automatically game for blackmail. Including - Guillam was acutely aware - himself.

"This does fail to explain why you're back in London and more precisely back in my car - still in my car after I told you to get out of it -" Guillam muttered, as the junction at Marylebone crept ever-nearer.

There was a long silence - or rather, as they were driving through Marylebone in the middle of the day with both windows open, a long _pause_ filled with noise - during which the bumble bee finally found her way to an exit and buzzed away over the city. It came to a conclusion when Tarr said with unconvincing airiness, "Heard it was a good plan to check in with your boss ... sir. Right? 'Check in'. Make sure you know what's what."

The lights changed, and Guillam pulled away from the line too quickly, throwing them both hard across the hot, leather-scented interior of the car. His mind rocketed back to the field outside of Sarratt, and he was even grateful that it hadn't chosen to recall the more perturbing moments in his own bathroom ... Guillam straightened up again, his linkless cuffs sliding down his forearms and bringing with them sweaty discomfort.

Park Road, mostly empty, lay at the far end of a subdued Baker Street, and Guillam eased on the accelerator with relief he hadn't expected.

For a moment Guillam let his attention slip from the road onto his passenger; Tarr was watching the shops and houses gather pace, what was left of his hair bobbing and rippling in the breeze, his arm braced against the window frame and his face set in an almost-scowl.

At least he wasn't starting, finishing, or involving himself in any more potentially fatal fights or bleeding all over Guillam's upholstery, Guillam reminded himself, but the feeling of irrational annoyance and dread presided all the same. Tarr brought it with him, like his ever-increasing collection of scars and his poor dentistry.

"You'll keep him off my back," Tarr said, eventually. He turned his head from the window and squinted at Guillam as the angle of the sun, bouncing of one of the shinier outcroppings of the Porsche, hit him square in the eyes. 

"I wouldn't be so certain," Guillam muttered, accelerating.

"Like I said --"

"Do not say 'I can make it worth your while'," Guillam said, returning his attention to the road. While his eyes ate the centre line he was acutely aware of Tarr's presence in the car; in this heat, the smell of his sweat was powerful enough to compete with the engine. "You can't. You're an unending thorn in my side."

Tarr shifted in the passenger seat, squeaking on the leather; Guillam kept his eyes resolutely on the road. "Can't I appeal to your sense of _duty_?" he asked with all the sarcasm such a question demanded. They both knew how far his sense of "duty" extended, and how badly it was already dented, and just how much Tarr was pushing his bloody luck.

"Don't be absurd."

"Find a fucking lay-by," Tarr said, as Park Road dissolved into Wellington Road, faster and faster, "and I'll do something _towards_ making it worth your while."

For some unknown reason the thought of being bracketed so coldly and professionally with the ministers: a card to be held or played, a useful contact and nothing more, despite being ostensibly and legally _Tarr's superior_ , made Guillam bridle internally. The very, very least he should be able to expect from someone whose movements he theoretically controlled would be an _explanation_ , but all Tarr offered were hand jobs.

He recalled the bathroom: hand jobs, and strange compliance that brought out things Guillam wasn’t sure he wanted bringing out, like flood waters heaving up poorly-buried corpses from cellars each spring. 

"Shut up," Guillam said sharply, "I don't want to hear anything else out of you. Unless it’s an explanation for why Verhoeven still wants to perforate your lungs."

“He didn’t tell you, then?” Tarr asked mildly, confirming Guillam’s suspicion that Tarr had seen through the lie or – more likely – already had the truth from one of the girls at Central Station. 

"Maybe I want to hear from you," Guillam said. It was a cheap, lousy, terrible trick which only ever worked on the irrecoverably stupid or defensive. While Tarr wasn't _stupid_ he could be backed into corners (although once in them he usually said what he thought people wanted to hear, and was of no help); defensive was something he did very much as second nature. "Maybe I'd like to know which of you is lying to me."

Tarr settled himself further into the hot leather embrace of the passenger seat, and Guillam swallowed the reprimand that he had better not make himself comfortable when he would be _leaving_ soon. "Oh, and if I don't say nothing then I'm not lying to you, am I?" 

This particular philosophical conundrum delivered, Tarr lapsed into silence and resumed his infernal tapping on the window frame. For a while Guillam brooded on the road ahead, the route to Cheltenham - he'd memorised it, but part of him wanted to check the AA road atlas anyway, though it lay under Tarr's running shoes at present - and Verhoeven's flat refusal to inform. The conspiracy of silence with occasional wounded bodies hurled out of it like lightning bolts from some Olympian battle was an annoyance and a distraction from the more important business of keeping the Circus afloat.

He wondered if the tapping was some form of Morse code, though he couldn't make out anything that made sense.

Guillam glanced at Tarr, who had once more drooped himself out of the window to let the breeze blow the summer sweat out of his hair and the dusty scum into his eyelashes, and listened more closely to the tapping.

Oh. _Satisfaction_. By the Stones.

He turned his attention to the mirror and watched Tarr flop back against the cooking leather. He watched him register Guillam's look of unimpressed recognition, and began - quite against his own will - tapping the same wretched song against the steering wheel with his left fingers; the side nearest to Tarr.

Tarr started humming.

"If you sing," Guillam said, "I shan’t bother to stop the car before I throw you out of it."

Tarr made a show of putting on his seat-belt.

"No," Guillam said.

Tarr watched his fingers which were - Guillam realised with some disgust - still beating out the same rhythm against the steering wheel as they roared past St John's Wood. There was something approaching a smile on his idiot mouth, which rattled Guillam so badly and abruptly that he almost failed to avoid the cyclist who popped up in front of the Porsche.

Verhoeven had still been using crutches, Guillam thought, swerving around the cyclist and receiving a short-lived earful of abuse for his consideration. He stole another look at Tarr, stretched out like a cat in a sunbeam over the too-hot seat; the marks on his knuckles, on his neck, that weren't quite bruises but weren't invisible either; the distortions of his ill-fitting t-shirt where the dressings and knitting, unfinished scar tissue must lie (to which his eyes were drawn like beacons). The Australian had never looked especially harmless, but there were moments - like this one - when Guillam had to strive to remind himself: Tarr shot Belgian gun-runners in the face for turning him in. Tarr broke Verhoeven's collarbone, and his kneecap.

It made it all the more alarming, with that in mind, that he'd come crawling nervously to Guillam's car, to his home, to lick his wounds and beg (in his peculiar, circuitory, indirect fashion) for protection.

He was clutching the steering wheel too tightly; Guillam wondered if he'd overreacted to the cyclist, and couldn't recall when he'd stopped his percussion and begun clinging to it like a lifebelt.

There was no need to look to see that Tarr was watching his hands with interest again.

"About that lay-by," Tarr begun, and Guillam turned to glare at him in time to see the nervous wetting of his lips. They were shortly spread in a kind of humourless grimace dolled up as a smile, and Tarr repeated, "About that lay-by," in a deeper voice doubtless meant to be seductive and instead only passing for foolish.

"Why _me_ ," Guillam asked the ceiling of the car. There was little on the roads here: push-chairs and sullen au pairs waited on the pavement for traffic to stop, and they passed by an elderly man in a raincoat (in this _heat_ ) walking an enormous black dog which even in the afternoon gave Guillam a sense of the sinister. 

"You're my boss," was Tarr's only answer.

The suburbs melted by in a long, sticky smear of kempt gardens and shimmering cars parked neatly against the pavements; modest little brick houses with modest little housewives plucking daisy heads outside lest someone spot a blemish on the unadulterated boredom of their lawns. Tarr hummed again, the same riff over and over like a needle caught in a groove.

Anticipation stole up Guillam's spine as sweat trekked and trickled down it; soon, soon there would be fields and the stultifying shade of trees alongside the road edges, and he would have to either pull over to kick Tarr out, or pull over to _not_ let him out.

He could just let him out in Finchley, in the suburbs, in any one of these streets. There was no traffic. Leave a stray dog to find his way back to whichever home he'd decided was his now.

Guillam kept his foot on the accelerator and listened to the growl of the engine, trying to block out the mumbled, near-tuneless recitation of occasional lyrics.

The suburbs slunk to the rear of the Porsche; sweat strolled without concern down the side of his face and dried there in the rush of wind. His shirt cuffs flapped in the breeze; from his left the _sotto voce_ "no no no, hey hey hey" wound around the sound of turning axles and was lost.

"Lay-by," Tarr pointed out, looking to Guillam with raised eyebrows. It was a mere scrape out of the verge, and as far as Guillam could tell anyone who passed on the road would have a first-rate view of whatever took place.

He drove past it, and turned into the open gateway beyond instead.

"Alright," Tarr said, and he whistled.

The field was lying fallow for whatever reason - Guillam had never considered himself an expert on agricultural practices and outside of H E Bates novels could scarcely see the point of rectifying this - and had grown up in a sumptuous tangle of wildflowers, long grass, and most all _brambles_. It was a flourishing waist-high monument to the pervasive nature of the blackberry vine, and the tractor ruts which scored the side of the narrow field had grass growing up not only between but inside them. Clearly no one had been here for some time.

Sun hammered down against the anvil of the seats and almost drained the life from Guillam as he - misguidedly, he was sure - turned off the engine.

Tarr, demonstrating mercy for possibly the first time, said nothing of the parallels to their trip to Sarratt.

"What did you _do_?" Guillam asked, opening the driver's door to let what little breeze there was here circulate the better.

"Fucked his wife," Tarr said, pushing open his own door so that the Porsche stood like a bathing bird, wings open, still hot but less stifling.

"He's not married," Guillam said.

"Well then that wasn't it." Tarr stretched his left leg out of the car, and rolled his head along the seat to look up at Guillam as if he was some drunk girl peering up into the eyes of her boyfriend. "Get it out, then."

"What," Guillam repeated, bracing his hands against the wheel, "did you do?"

"Get it out," Tarr insisted, raising his eyebrows. He looked surprisingly sleepy, either stunned by the sun or worn out from whatever had left him with the bags under his eyes, but it was an enthusiastic sleepiness, the lethargy of pre-emptive cooperation, if not - Guillam snorted at his own vanity - _attraction_.

"I need to know you're not going to show up bleeding on my belongings again," Guillam said stubbornly, hanging from the steering wheel. "Explain yourself."

"Well I don't exactly _want_ to turn up with fucking holes in me either," Tarr said, holding his gaze for too long. "Keep him away from me."

"Even if I _were_ in a position to give him an overseas posting - which I'm not - what good do you think it will do? He has friends here." Guillam steered the conversation - almost leaning on the wheel as if to guide it by force - away from the simple, nagging demands of Tarr's repeated entreaties and the answering suggestions of his balls. _Get it out, then._

Butterflies bobbed improbably through the scribbled-on brambles, feeding on flowers Guillam couldn't remember the names of (Jim would know, Jim would have known; not just their names but every possible use they could be put to, a practical countryside sort of man). The uppermost tier of the loops and swirls, studded with barbs, swayed gently as a car passed on the road behind them without slowing, dragging Guillam's pulse rate up and down with it.

"You could send me," Tarr pointed out, his sleepiness stripped from him like the act it so clearly was.

"No," Guillam said, "everyone's coming home now. You know that. No one gets sent out anew unless there's a specific purpose. No residencies."

" _Not dying_ is a specific purpose," Tarr said uneasily, and he twitched his right arm in such a way that Guillam thought he was about to reach out across the narrow gap between the seats and touch him.

He snapped at his libido that this was _not_ what he wanted. It ignored him.

"If I have to put you both in separate holding rooms at Sarratt," Guillam groaned, shrivelling internally once more at the thought of the paperwork, the explanations, and above all of Smiley's distracted but faintly disappointed expression should he have to tell him, "I will do that."

Caging field men was about as comfortable for them as shoving a tiger in a kennel, but Tarr said nothing. He made a feint with his right hand again, failing to pass the invisible barrier between the two seats before he let it fall onto his own thigh.

"What did you do, then?" Guillam asked, unmooring himself from the steering wheel and falling back against his own seat, his shirt plastering itself in a disgusting poultice of sweat against his back. He extended his right leg out of the Porsche until he sat near-mirroring Tarr.

"A bit late paying some money back," Tarr said dismissively, and movement drew Guillam's eye to where he idly stroked the inside of his own thigh with his extended fingers. It shouldn't have worked any more than the rest of his tawdry attempts at seduction did, but either the heat or exasperation had addled Guillam's mind, and it did.

"You've tried that one already," Guillam said simply.

"Does it matter?" Tarr asked peevishly, narrowing his eyes. "Get it out. I'll suck you off. Stop asking."

Despite the words _I'll suck you off_ being both nasty and surprisingly effective, Guillam felt no pressing need to obey orders from a subordinate who was in no position to bargain and apparently ill-trained in the business of begging. He thought back to the bathroom, unbidden: Tarr's mouth was soft, and he had no doubt it would feel -- he had evidently had more practice than Guillam had suspected -- but the recollection of feeling it _gasp_ and _twitch_ in pain against his own mouth buoyed him more than the anticipation of having it around his cock.

"Yes it does matter," Guillam said, fiddling briefly with his cuffs, trying to roll them up out of the way of his forearms. "How much worse can it possibly be than everything you've done already?"

Tarr let out a short, humourless laugh, and almost before it was over had fixed his eyes on Guillam's with the brisk intensity of the war-damaged. "Oh. Yeah."

Watching him as he might watch some dangerous, chained animal, Tarr extended his right arm slowly; instead of drawing back at the gap, he slid his hand over the groin of Guillam's trousers, and laid his hot, heavy palm across the beginnings of an erection that Guillam refused to accept that he had. He squeezed his fingers around Guillam's cock and rubbed, gently at first, pushing down against Guillam's cock until Guillam had to reprimand himself not to push up against Tarr's hand.

He lay back against the seat, trying not to catch Tarr's eye: it was hard, because Tarr was watching his face as intently as he might listen at a safe door, feeling for a catch.

Guillam knew precisely what the tell was - a breath that didn't escape his mouth properly - that sent Tarr into a change of tactics, reaching for his fly. He plucked at the tiny metal pull with pincer-like fingers, and drew it down in one smooth movement, slipping his hand inside. 

His palm was wet with sweat against Guillam's cock, and Guillam was unable to stop himself making an abortive grope for Tarr's wrist.

Tarr paused, but did not remove his hand. Rather, he tugged Guillam's cock into the air - it made little difference to the heat - and deliberately held his gaze while he wet his lips.

Rather than placing them onto Guillam's cock right away, Tarr reached down and unbuckled his seatbelt at last, and leaned more fully across the breach between the seats. He took Guillam's wrist in his hand, pulling his arm away from its stiff, awkward safety by his side, and placed Guillam's hand upon his head with a brief, unhappy smile.

Guillam closed his fingers around Tarr's hair. It had, to his surprise, been recently washed. It felt soft and fine in spite of the sweat on his scalp and the city grime that was surely clinging to it. 

Tarr took a breath, said, "Okay, then," and took Guillam's cock in his mouth.

It took only a few seconds for him to become aware of how silent, how absurdly peaceful the waste land was, now that Tarr was neither talking nor staring at him; Guillam pressed his free hand over his own mouth so that he wouldn't begin to breathe too shallowly and disturb himself. He listened to the swish and buzz of cars on the main road, in the distance, to the hum of a pylon somewhere out of sight, as his face began to sweat around his hand.

He found he was stroking the short, fine hairs on the back of Tarr's head as it bobbed up and down in his lap, his thumb and forefinger scissoring to rub the longer strands atop his head between them, compulsively glorying in their texture.

Tarr had indeed practiced this particular art, in Guillam's estimation. Clearly his time in the Lake District had been put to good use; his tongue was a wet finger stroking the underside of Guillam's cock, and the tension in Guillam's thighs and groin and the small of his back built like the gathering of afternoon thunderclouds.

Overhead, the sky was as clear as a baby's conscience.

Swimming in his own sweat, Guillam half-consciously let his hand slip from his mouth, pulling on his lower lip, as Tarr's teeth lipped the edge of his foreskin just roughly enough to make his body shiver even in the heat.

He undid his collar buttons without thinking, pulling sweat-damp cotton away from the dip of his throat in gratitude; Guillam had unbuttoned his shirt to the sternum before he thought what he was doing, and by then he'd already had the benefit of air on his chest, and didn't stop.

Tarr reached up - his head still moving, still drooling saliva down into Guillam's pubic hair - and his fingers brushed Guillam's at the first shallow folds of belly skin, as Guillam finished unbuttoning and Tarr began skimming his hand (the other pressed now to the base of Guillam's cock, like a stabiliser) up over his body.

Guillam clasped a second handful of Tarr's hair, pulling him slowly but firmly down onto his cock until Tarr's fat, full lips pressed against his pubic hair and Tarr's throat made a revolting sound like the precursor to a retch.

He had a clear and perfect recollection of the last time anyone had touched him, the last time anyone had absently thumbed his nipple with a soft touch like this, and he wanted none of the memory soiled by this development.

Tarr, still half-choking, spread his hand like a starfish and braced himself against Guillam's chest, his fingertips touching sternum, nipple, too-hot skin with sweat drying in the bare breeze. Guillam could hear his impeded breathing, and he wanted so badly to hate him. 

He wanted to tear his hands from Tarr's head and twist his arm back away from his chest, to smack his face on the dashboard and tell him to take his stupid feud and his infuriating half-acquiescence and stop waking up parts of Guillam that he had forced dormant through will and drink. He wanted to take his hands from Tarr's head and peel his fingers away and snap them; he wanted to beat him with whatever was to hand and roar at him that his manipulation was unwanted and his conduct unacceptable.

He wanted to lean into the finger of Tarr's that was still miraculously stroking gently back and forth at the edge of his nipple.

Guillam pulled harder on Tarr's hair, dug his fingers into the fold of his neck; let his legs splay further apart and rolled his hips up to meet Tarr's mouth.

The thunderclouds gathering in his lower body stupefied his brain, and he stopped noticing the meadow and the sounds of the road. He failed to note the sweat that dripped from his bent elbow.

_Glrk_ , Tarr's mouth said as Guillam dragged him by the hair upward again, enough to leave a wet swathe of skin open to the air; and drove his head down again: _Uck_.

But he didn't take his hand from the base of Guillam's cock, and he didn't stop stroking his nipple, his chest, with the same distressing gentleness and apparent desire.

Guillam took his right hand from Tarr's hair, and closed it without pause around his throat.

Even amid the mind-dampening sensations of a blow-job, he felt a kind of bright, sharp satisfaction at the panicked stiffening of Tarr's body: his muscles tightened, his fingers stopped moving, and for a moment it seemed that he would thrash, that he would fight back. Guillam, his own sharpness eroded by the electric sensation of his body, did not recall that if Tarr fought back he would almost certainly win.

Tarr's nostrils flared violently as he struggled for breath, but when Guillam pushed down on the top of his head and dug his fingers into the soft parts of his throat, the man went limp again, and let himself be gagged. 

His fingers began their tender circuits upon Guillam's chest again, weak as a kitten, and Guillam - quite unconsciously, for he certainly wouldn't have wanted to - rubbed the top of Tarr's ear with the side of his thumb. It must have seemed like acknowledgement; he didn't mean it to be.

He was not sure for how long he fucked Tarr's mouth like this, only that his lips, just visible against Guillam's cock, were starting to darken. It was when Tarr began to struggle again - alarmed, perhaps, by the numbness of his extremities - that Guillam felt himself on the precipice.

Tarr tried to speak: something garbled, fearful, just coherent enough for the back of Guillam's mind to parse it as _please stop, I can't breathe_.

Guillam yanked Tarr's head back by the hair hard enough to smack it into the lower curve of the steering wheel, and came; Tarr's fingers scrabbling weakly at his chest.

There was a moment before his own fingers unlocked from around Tarr's throat which came back to haunt him on sleepless nights; his balls emptying into a slack, suffocating mouth, he let go Tarr's hair and clamped his hand across the man's flared nostrils, hissing, " _Stop. Breathing_."

But with the end of the orgasm he fell, drained and damp with sweat, back against the seat. He released Tarr, who scrambled back into his own seat panting and rubbing at his throat with wide, accusing eyes. Even though, in the rational scheme of things (especially now, half-naked and drained by orgasm), Tarr could probably have beaten him to a pulp or stabbed him to death with the knife he always carried, Tarr seemed more concerned with regaining his lost air than settling a score.

Guillam felt his own chest rise and fall in slower time as the sounds of the waste land and the distant A-road began to bleed back into his mind.

"Jesus Christ," Tarr said in a hoarse voice, laying his forehead against the dashboard and wheezing. There was, Guillam noted with the beginnings of dispassionate revulsion, semen on his lips. "Jesus... Christ."

"What did you do?" Guillam asked, trying to force himself out of the stupor that would undoubtedly descend upon him now.

"Nothing like _that_ ," Tarr muttered, still plainly unnerved and still wheezing for air, his sides inflating and deflating like a smithy bellows. The outlines of his makeshift dressings - probably more cotton padding and electrical tape - bulged under his sweat-darkened t-shirt. 

Guillam considered trying to re-button his shirt, but his hands were still shaking.

"I'm going on up to Cheltenham," Guillam said, apropos of very little. He examined the steering wheel with an apathetic eye; there was blood on the lower curve. "Where you can either push off and vanish, or come back with me and go into holding at Sarratt."

Tarr, still massaging his throat and gulping air in uneven mouthfuls, nodded weakly. He would not, Guillam noted with some slow-mounting horror, meet his eye.

"This is fucked," Tarr said, in a low voice, shaking his head.

"Verhoeven goes into holding too," Guillam said absently. He felt heavy, colder in spite of the aching sun, as if something had left him. A creeping, terrible loneliness - the awareness of precisely what his job _was_ , and how far it placed him beyond normal interactions - began to settle in the pit of his stomach as he pushed his cock back into his trousers with clumsy, sluggish hands.

"Totally fucked," Tarr repeated, and before Guillam could muster the ire - he knew it would have been there before - to sneer at him to stop being so silly, Tarr grabbed at his wrist again.

He thrust Guillam's hand into his own crotch, caught his eye. There was the unmistakable hot pressure of an erection under the seam of his jeans. 

"I'm not," Tarr said, letting go of Guillam's wrist and rubbing at his own throat again in some dismay. "I'm not _like you_."

_Yes you are,_ Guillam thought, recognising the cold loneliness in his abdomen for what it was as the roar of an overhead plane began to infringe on his consciousness. The tumbling masses of brambles shook and swayed in a sudden, aggressive breeze, and a butterfly landed on the bright-hot bonnet of the Porsche, sunning itself. 

_I don't want you to be,_ he thought, rubbing his palm slowly along the ridge of Tarr's jeans; Tarr slid down in his seat. _I don't want you to be, but yes, you are._


End file.
